Having been raised in a household of oral storytelling, stories have been in my life blood since the day I could understand language and narrative.  Being able to explore human behaviour and cultural differences through stories has always fascinated me.  So when

I listened to a webinar involving Pat Kenny, a national e-learning manager from the Health Service Executive, that discussed using storytelling in e-learning it, it made me think.

According to Clarke & Rossiter, in adults there are three ways to learn through stories: stories heard, stories told and stories recognised.   Here is how I interpret each one:

Stories heard – Should more content include personal stories and experiences?

 The connection I make to stories is through a character, a word, a situation or picture that evokes an immediate attachment through familiarity.  It is not my story, but there is something familiar – something I know or have experienced that forms an instant connection.

When designing e-learning solutions we should not only use scenarios but extend this to personal stories.  The webinar discussed how patients’ complaints and stories of being cared for were  instrumental in allowing healthcare professionals to understand their experiences and so change the way they delivered care.   By empathising with patients the healthcare professionals found a new motivation to change their way of working.

Stories told –Try incorporating learners’ stories into e-learning

I view my life as an encyclopaedia of people, places, interactions, smells and sounds which I bookmark as stories in my head.  Our life stories help us to construct meaning whenever we experience something new.  We all share our stories.  We share them in the pub, in the classroom, at home, at work – everywhere we go.

Sharing stories is a social interaction.  There is a familiarity, a shorthand, a space for a cultural exchange.  It often feels a necessity to do so because it’s an indispensable way of forging bonds between people.  We should use this behaviour to improve learning programmes.  Why not incorporate learners’ stories in the storyboarding process?

Stories recognised – The key to behaviour change

Finally, the key to getting successful emotional engagement through storytelling is self-recognition.   A feedback survey on our mental resilience course for TfL illustrates this. It showed that 85% of individuals found the scenarios realistic or could personally relate to the scenarios used. This is what helped 70% of individuals to implement long term change.

To find out more, why not visit Saffron Interactive at Stand 20 at the upcoming Learning Technologies Forum and attend our seminar, which is on the topic of emotional investment and behaviour change.

This quote from Octavia E Butler’s story The Parable of the Sower encapsulates the effect that experiential stories can have on individuals and organisations.

All that you touch

You Change

All that You Change

Changes you…

Like most of Londoners, I rely on tube transportation to travel around the city. When on the tube, I usually spend my commuting time playing video games on my smartphone. When I look around I realise that many others, like me, are immersed in trying to solve puzzles, escape from zombies, shoot pigs, and so on.

Games have been around for hundreds of years and video games are today becoming the preferred form of entertainment. If we look at the most recent statistics about online gaming, we learn that:

• The average age of a gamer is 30 and he/she has been playing for an average of 14 years
• 47% of gamers are women
• 42% of game players believe that computer and video games give the most value for their money, compared with DVD’s music or going out to the movies
• 59% of parents spend time with their children playing videogames at least monthly

In addition to that, according to recent research carried out by SDT, time spent playing online games is increasing and mobiles and tablets are catching up to PC gaming.

There’s no doubt that game mechanics have a fundamental role to making an experience ‘fun’. But that said, what is it that makes the experience meaningful to the player? What is it that makes the player play and want to play more? Is it the points we accumulate? Is it the fact we can see our name at the top of a leaderboard, or is it badges we crave for?

An interesting answer to this question comes from the field of psychology. Video games are so powerful because they have the potential to satisfy three basic psychological needs, namely autonomy, relatedness and competence. So, an activity that meets these criteria is likely to be received by players as engaging and fun.

In the past two or three years, the word ‘gamification’ has emerged in the field of business. As the word suggests you would think that it must have something to do with games. Right? In fact, ‘gamification is the use of game thinking and game mechanics in a non-game context in order to engage users and solve problems’.

In other words, gamification is not about designing games – it’s about applying the mechanics of games to solve a specific objective.

Gamification is rapidly spreading and it’s estimated that by 2015, 40% of the top 1000 global organizations will use gamification as the primary mechanism to transform business operations. Points, badges, and a leaderboard are the preferred games mechanics used in gamification.

But do they work to solve a specific problem? Are they enough to determine a desired behaviour change? Maybe not and interestingly enough, Gartner estimates that by 2014 an astonishing 80% of gamified systems will fail their business objectives due to bad design.

It’s not as simple as imitating a video game or app. For a successful gamified system a great deal of thinking is required: that entails combining rewards that can foster people’s external motivation and meet their basic, intrinsic psychological and emotional needs. I’ll continue looking at game mechanics and learner motivation in more detail in Part 2, so stay tuned.

To find out more about game mechanics, emotional investment and see some of the latest methodologies in action, visit Saffron Interactive at Stand 20 at the upcoming Learning Technologies Forum and attend our seminar.

This article is an edited extract from the upcoming June issue of Inside Learning Technologies and Skills magazine.

Last month, Nicholas Baum explained some of the principles of something called ‘me-learning’. He outlined the mechanics of how an e-learning course can become a space in which learners can visualise new behaviours in action: ‘Here’s where I am; here’s where I could be; this is what I need to do to get there’. Personalised input and personalised output via emotionally charged content is another way to put it.

The approach has been proven to work in courses such as that developed by Transport for London on mental resilience, where qualitative and quantitative evaluations drew a direct line from meaningful emotional engagement to massive return on investment. So how does it work? Where does the why really come from? What ‘buy-in buttons’ should those who design learning (and learning platforms) be pushing?

A revolution which has been gathering pace in the field of behavioural economics is highly relevant here. It’s changing the way that we are shaping the online world more generally, and e-learning needs to sit up and listen.

Traditional economics has treated the human as homo economicus, who is ‘Sovereign in tastes, steely-eyed and point-on in perception of risk’. The problem with this model is that ‘homo economicus is a rare breed.’ I would go further and say that the self-interested, calculating human doesn’t really exist at all.  In fact, our brain chemistry motivates us to make decisions that aren’t necessarily rational or even self-interested.

Our memories are structured around emotional peaks and troughs, not averages or a steady accumulation of benefits. The ‘endowment effect’ means, for example, that we’ll place a much higher price on a teacup that is ours, than on an identical cup which isn’t – and we even hold on to shares long after the point where it made sense to sell them. A sense of belonging is the trump card.

This complicates our thinking about motivations for learning, and explains why the addictive learning environment can’t be as easily manufactured as we perhaps thought. It might make perfect sense to you why a learner would naturally engage with a learning intervention because it has social and game-based characteristics – that’s what creates a sense of reward, right?

But your course or platform is an imposter: it doesn’t carry with it the same emotional highs or the sense of belonging as the experience you based it on. It is a feature, emptied of emotional benefits.

To make e-learning better at changing behaviours, it’s time to start seriously asking where the e-learning course or platform that you have planned fits into the emotional narrative of your learners’ lives. What mood state are you going to capture and utilise? Most importantly, how are you going to make a learner feel like it belongs to her? In this sense, perhaps it’s time to start including emotional outcomes, as well as learning outcomes, in your next project specification.

Find out more by attending Saffron’s seminar on emotional investment in learning at the upcoming Learning Technologies Summer Forum. You can register here for free.

A few days back I was browsing my favourite website on my sister’s new smartphone. Even though I made sure I was accessing the mobile version of the site, I still wasn’t able to see content I could see when browsing the same site on my PC.

The impact on the user experience that just a small impediment like this makes is huge. Rather than try and force a square peg fit in a round hole, when something isn’t compatible, we prefer to leave.

So are you providing the right shaped space for your learners? Mashable has already declared 2013 as a responsive web design year, and rightly so: responsive web design for e-learning courses is something of a specialty at Saffron Interactive!

The basic idea is that all the hard work of designers and developers doesn’t get messed up when viewed on devices with different screen resolutions. This is becoming easier and easier because of the advent of CSS3 and its design techniques such as fluid grid layouts, media queries and flexible images. Media queries are used to figure out what resolution of device is being used by the user while flexible images and fluid grids then resize correctly to fit with the screen accordingly.

Ethan Marcotte was the person who coined the term “Responsive Web Design” in 2010 on his “A book apart” website. Since then many of the best projects have been developed using his Responsive Web Design techniques. Some of my favourite sites that use this approach include:

• www.bostonglobe.com
• www.greygoose.com
• www.simplebits.com
• www.thisismadebyhand.com

So how do we apply these ideas when we’re developing e-learning? Before you start designing courses or portals according to responsive web design (RWD) principles, there are a few technical things you need to consider:

1. Most mobile devices are not compatible with CSS media queries;
2. As RWD works on image resizing, the full image is downloaded on a user’s device and then resized to fit the screen, potentially taking time and impacting on performance;
3. Though RWD aims to resize content for any device, there still will be few devices out there that won’t give 100% optimized user experience due to unusual resolutions; and
4. Not all browsers (i.e. IE) support CSS3.

For those interested in exploring the topic in more depth, check out the following resources:

• http://www.abookapart.com/products/responsive-web-design
• http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articles/design-theory/designing-for-a-responsive-web/
• http://bradfrost.github.io/this-is-responsive/

These days, whizz-bang platforms in the world of e-learning are aplenty. The problem is that great content isn’t. In fact, the typical experience of e-learning content remains so negative that to many outsiders the word itself seems somehow doom-laden and ill-fated. (Forget this preconception at your peril, by the way.)

Now imagine an empty Facebook – no friends, no comments and no memes – and you are imagining the actual appeal to the learner of that shiny platform which looked so good at the Learning Technologies show. (Or you are imagining the final years of Friendster, MSN Spaces or Bebo … !)

Yet the continuing assumption that platforms somehow replace the content in them is what drives vendors to invest millions in developing clever platforms (and put them on sale at prices which are not so clever) whilst ignoring the most important person: the learner. She is not interested in features, but in benefits.

And real benefits are derived from content. Think about Wikipedia. That simple combination of useful learning and easy collaboration is the explosive formula you should be aiming for. Now think about search engines before Google arrived. That overburdened, ‘desperate to be useful’ mess is what you are not aiming for.

My point is that all features really do is facilitate the smooth delivery and discussion of content. Some features are indeed revolutionary, but mimicking those won’t redeem a poorly planned content strategy. And be economical – a feature which is cool but not used may as well not be there at all.

The uncomfortable truth which LMS vendors don’t like to mention is that spending your pennies wisely on an affordable open source option can do this facilitating just as well as spending millions on a proprietary one. Let the content sing – and make sure it can sing. That’s your why. The platform is just the how.

It’s all about conversation

Understanding the ‘why’ before you get to the ‘how’ is another version of the features / benefits problem. A case in point is mobile learning.

The putative ‘how’ of mobile is becoming easy. Most authoring tools now publish in html5. But will html5 redeem courses which are non-interactive, overlong and poorly designed? No. Will dull content become interesting just because it is on a smartphone? Maybe, but not for long. The delivery mechanism is a feature – not a benefit.

The real ‘why’ behind m-learning is the pressing need to create learning which competes with the far higher standards of availability, accessibility and user experience we have come to expect from e-content. This applies to any device.

Above all, you are aiming for a user experience which holds a conversation and rewards the learner for her participation. The first prerequisite to holding this conversation is to speak in her language. The second prerequisite is to have something worth saying.

Technology can help deliver on these prerequisites, but it won’t redefine them out of existence. And if you fail to accomplish either, you may as well have stuck a post-it note to her desk.

Continuing from last week’s blog post, one of our most experienced language specialists at Saffron has put together another five top tips to help avoid your e-learning projects getting lost in translation!

1. Is the translator qualified?

There are too many people out there who speak several languages and advertise themselves as translators. If you’re looking for quality, check whether they’re registered with a professional body. Do they have a university education in the foreign language(s) they claim to be proficient in? At least if they’re certified or qualified in some respect you can be ensured that they have high standards and a strong sense of ethos.

2. Does the translator have relevant experience?

Choose someone whose previous experience is relevant to what you need. For instance, if you need to translate a course about security at work on a boat construction site, a translator with an understanding of engineering terminology would be most suitable. If, however, your next project is about turning a particularly difficult piece of legislation into an interactive course available to all employees within an organisation, you should look for someone experienced in translating creative writing.

3. Localise (not localize!) the language

Make sure your translator understands the local culture and language of the learner. An English course for a British audience may use different terminology and idioms than a course designed for an Australian or American audience. And the same applies for other languages such as French and Portuguese!

4. Respect the course’s original style

As well as defining the learner, also take care in briefing the translator about the tone and style of the course. It’s a waste of time writing high quality English content for a course that’ll be translated into six languages if that isn’t also reflected in the alternative languages.

5. Get straight to the point

Have you ever noticed how the English section of an instruction manual comprises less space than other languages? So do bear in mind that most translations from English will usually contain at least 30% (or even 50%) more words, and that those words may be longer than in the original text. (Consider that speed limit in English can be translated as Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung in German!)

As parts 1 and 2 of my tips should impress on readers, it takes much more than a dictionary to be a good translator and translators are not made overnight. Stay tuned for part 3 of my translation tips!

One of our most experienced language specialists at Saffron has put together her five top tips to help avoid your e-learning projects getting lost in translation!

1. Hire a native speaker

It’s a common mistake to assume that just because someone speaks a foreign language that they can translate everything into anything. Remember that only native speakers of a language will know the local customs and habits that subtly affect and impact on a language. You can’t substitute for the real McCoy!

2. Check that the translator matches your requirements

It can be quite difficult to know your translator’s efficacy when you don’t speak the language(s) they’ll be translating into. Since the storyboard you’ll be sending will probably be written in English, even if they’re a native English speaker, it’s crucial that you test their English reading and writing ability. If your translator doesn’t understanding the storyboard, they’ll be sure to mess up their translations!

3. Train the translator

Every company has an induction programme for their new employees, so why not use that material to train the translator? This will give them a great insight on your company’s standards and will help them assess and adopt your company’s writing style.

4. Translate from A to B, not B to C

Avoid at all costs translating from another translation. If you have a version of the course in the original language, send that version to the translator. The best example to highlight that issue is the Bible. It’s been translated from Aramaic to Greek to Latin to the current versions. Studies of the bible in the 1990s and 2000s indicate that quite a bit has been lost in translation!

5. Distrust automated translation

So many aspects of your working life have been digitalised that it’s easy to forget what technology is supposed to be for! And this is perhaps most true in the translation industry. Ask your translator what system they use, and how. Make sure they use technology only to assist their translations, rather than using it to fully automate the entire process. If they use automated translation, you might as well use Google Translate; the result will be the same and you will save yourself money in the process! Remember that language is fundamentally about people and emotions, not machines.

As an e-learning designer, there are many things I love about Hollywood! Here I’ve put together four ways to help you bring a touch of tinsel-town to your training…

1. Adaptation is really about storytelling

Life of Pi is a good example. It’s a great book which lost none of its impact as a film. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave Life of Pi four out of four stars, referring to it as ‘a miraculous achievement of storytelling and a landmark of visual mastery.’

Just like Life of Pi, great e-learning content should inspire learners to find out more about where it came from. After watching the movie, Barack Obama went on to read Life of Pi and wrote to the author, Yann Martel, to tell him it was ‘an elegant proof of God, and the power of storytelling.’

Both Ebert and Obama agree that Life of Pi is truly magical because of its storytelling – and a great story is the key to adapting any content into e-learning. But forgetting about God, miracles and tigers for one moment, can Hollywood help us transform a dull health and safety manual into an exciting e-learning course? Yes, it can! And here’s how…

2. ‘Go Hollywood’ with your scenarios

Hollywood teaches us that bringing a dry subject to life is all about engaging scenarios. Think about Simon Gruber’s crazy tasks for John McClane in Die Hard with a Vengeance. They really make health and safety into exciting stuff! Hollywood knows all too well that true engagement means putting the audience ‘in the story’ and involving us emotionally in the characters’ decisions.

Here’s an example. If you’re creating an assessment on what type of fire extinguisher should be used in an emergency, try ‘going Hollywood’. Depict a room on fire with other flammable objects near it and a timer ticking as the options appear on screen. You’ll find that the learner’s response is a little more ‘John McClane’ than usual!

3. Break it up and branch it out

Hollywood never tells us everything in one go – so stay away from lots of text and use shorter ‘scenes’ instead. Long paragraphs explaining a process should be broken into screens with characters and conversations between them. Star Wars would’ve been pretty boring if the whole film consisted of the rolling text at the beginning!

In fact, using branching scenarios actually allows us e-learning designers to do better than Hollywood.  We all know any bombs planted in the start of a movie will be disarmed at the end by the protagonist; but imagine if we could ‘play’ the movie again to see a different situation unfold and witness how it’s handled.

With branching, we can hold the learner’s focus by introducing a situation and giving them a chance to handle it in their own way (supplying guidance only when they need it!). So e-learning should really be more like Run Lola Run – each run starts from the same situation but develops differently to produce a different outcome.

4. Roll out a red carpet of rewards

There’s one last thing thatHollywood can teach us. What is it that drives Bond or Ethan Hunt to do their tasks so heroically (and precisely)? It’s the accolade they get in the end! We should do the same with unique scores, medals and leaderboards. We all secretly enjoy a little slice of the red carpet. Make your learners put in that extra effort to take the limelight!

It may sound absurd to say we should ‘organise’ creativity. For many people, creativity and organisation are two extreme ends of a spectrum. Creative ideas are supposed to appear from nowhere when we don’t expect them. That’s just how the creative process works – which means it must be okay for creative people to be totally disorganised, right?

They certainly think so! How many times have you heard ‘creative’ people say ‘what we do is can’t be done in an organised, processed way – it’s all about letting the creative juices flow and seeing where that leads you!’ A recent study has even revealed that when creative people were approached with the question directly, only 7% said they were ‘very organised’:

So does organising creativity matter? Is there a reason to change this behaviour?

I didn’t think so, until I read Making Ideas Happen by Scott Belsky. You may have already heard about it or even read the book. The points that he makes have definitely convinced me to organise my creative projects, so I thought I’d share them with you.

Belsky says that we tend to admire ‘ideas’ and not the process – believing that it’s only creativity that matters.  If some creative solution appeals to us, we always say: ‘Wow, what a great idea that is!’ And seconds later the regret comes… ‘I actually thought about that myself. Pity I didn’t do anything about it!’

This is revealing, because according to Belsky it’s not so much the ideas that matter but the ability to make those ideas happen that we find difficult. ReiteratingEdison’s famous remark that ‘genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration’, Scott explains why the 99% is so important. The formula below is his secret to making those great ideas happen:

His point is that to be effective, the creative mind has to perform according to an organised plan, instead of letting it wander away in a cloud of ideas.

According to Belsky, the relationship between organisation, creativity and overall impact is summarised by this equation:

CREATIVITY x ORGANISATION = IMPACT

So what happens when there’s plenty of creativity but no organisation?

100 x 0 = 0

Uh oh. This makes it clear that, even though somebody may have lots of ideas, if you’re not organised you’ll fail to reach the finish line. Now consider half as much creativity, and just a little more organisation:

50 x 2 = 100

There it is! Belsky‘s equation explains why sometimes the not-so-creative ideas have worked. Look at Apple, for example. This brand is famous for ideas and creativity – but it also focuses on organisation. The only way Apple can keep producing remarkable new products is to keep those creative people on a tight leash.

It’s not really that difficult for creative individuals to stay organised – even if they say it is – and making the effort is worth it. Waiting for those perfectly formed inventions to fall from the sky might be alluring, but wouldn’t you rather impose a little discipline and start making all ideas actually happen?

If you’d like to know more about “Making Ideas Happen”, visit the link below to see Scott Belsky talking about it: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsQtptwMCFI

No doubt many of you reading this will be aware of the food scandal that’s currently going on within our supermarkets, rocking a nation of meat-lovers. Revelations that many supposed ‘beef’ products on sale on our shelves contain a percentage of horse meat have shocked and caused outrage amongst consumers.

Personally, I have to admit that as long as there’s no health hazard posed, I’m not overly worried if I’m eating a horseburger; in fact there’s even a sense of personal gain as I’ve most likely expanded my gastronomic horizons, albeit unknowingly.

But how was the ‘horsegate’ scandal allowed to happen in the first place? Is it that the correct procedures aren’t in place amongst supermarkets and food producers, or that perhaps in some cases they simply weren’t followed? Or could it be that, perhaps, workers in the supply chain lacked adequate training to be able to follow them effectively in the first place? I don’t profess to know the answer, but I’m quite certain of one thing:UKsupermarkets and food suppliers will surely be stepping up their staff training to ensure that this doesn’t happen again!

For any business that has procedures and processes in place, it’s essential that training needs are realised and effective programmes are put in place to ensure that these are followed.

Let’s take the example of a current project that we’re working on here at Saffron. We’ve just embarked on an exciting new project to develop a suite of engaging e-learning courses for an organisation to support a key stage in the process of awarding research funding to academic institutions. It involves a great deal of consideration and evaluation amongst what are known as ‘peer reviewers’ in order to decide which institutions should be awarded funding based on the individual merit of their proposal.

I’m not saying for one minute that there is any link between ‘horsegate’ and peer reviews; but what’s key to take away here is the necessity for such training to ensure that important processes are reinforced.

This particular organisation approached us because they successfully identified a key training need to support such an important part of their work, and decided to deliver this through e-learning. Perhaps food producers and retailers alike will also soon begin to identify new training needs – most likely they already have.  But how is this done effectively? How do organisations ensure that they are truly addressing the key training requirements? By carrying out an effective Training Needs Analysis (TNA) – that’s how!

A successful TNA allows an organisation to review the learning and development needs amongst its staff. In most cases, it requires a great degree of research and a number of methods are normally employed to ensure that the process is effective.

To finish off this blog, I’ve put together three key tips that will be sure to help you in your TNA activities:

1. Ask probing questions

   Find out what different teams need by asking insightful questions. Don’t necessarily ask managers and employees what training they think they need, but ask them what they feel they will need to achieve their targets or deliverables. What’s been most challenging for them in the last few months? Aim to get specific examples, not just vague generalisations.

2. Review search terms on your Learning Management System (LMS) or intranet

   Reviewing the key search terms within your LMS gets to the heart of what your staff are concerned about and the training that they need. When the Head of Google Learning Labs did this recently and evaluated the top terms in their learning portal and compared this with the other information they gained from their TNA activities, they found that they ‘correlated exactly’. Take a look yourself here (at around 15 minutes in).

3. Review key business metrics and trends

   Key signs within your organisation can come from your business metrics and trends. Investigate these: Are sales lower because staff feel they lack the necessary skills to carry out their job effectively? And are people leaving because the training is not adequate in their role? Delve deeper and identify if there is a training need that needs to be addressed. Issues such as these can indicate that there may be more serious training issues bubbling under the surface.